Overlord (57 page)

“We have to see to it they don’t,” Compton said.

“Niles, there is one more thing I need to tell you,” Virginia said, not wanting to add to the director’s already burdened mind. “Peachtree and Camden want Matchstick and they will raid the complex in order to get at him. We now suspect that it was Peachtree along with the killer of Jack’s sister that arranged for the first raid on the Group six months ago, trying to procure that aggression formula uncovered in Mexico.”

Niles shook his head adamantly even though it caused him pain to do so.

“Get Matchstick out of there. He’s given Overlord all he can; it’s time for him to go home, where our men can protect him and Gus.”

“I’ll see to it,” Virginia said. “General, I know it’s asking a lot, but can the FBI give us the men we need to cover the house and property in Arizona?”

“With the resignation of the president’s man at the FBI and Camden’s new choice in that position, no, I’m sorry. If I ask it will only tell Camden and Peachtree exactly where your asset will be.”

“I want Pete Golding to stay with Matchstick and Gus. Keep them safe. I also want any other civilian volunteers at Group to go with Pete. With our military arm spread all over the globe, it’s our only security besides the retirees we have watching the place,” Niles said as he felt his strength waning fast.

“Get some sleep, Dr. Compton, we’ll do what we can from here,” Caulfield said as he and Virginia watched him fall asleep.

“I’ll get these orders out to my Group to get Matchstick and Gus out of there; you stay with the president and let us know as soon as he awakens. Camden has to be stopped before he interferes with Overlord any more than he has.”

Caulfield nodded, took Virginia’s shoulder and squeezed, then left the room.

Virginia stayed a moment looking at Niles. She shook her head as she realized just how much Niles had personally altered the world they knew. She again wiped a tear away as she moved for the door.

The world would never know the names of Niles Compton or that of the Matchstick Man, and Dr. Virginia Pollock knew that to be wrong and unacceptable.

CAMP ALAMO

ANTARCTICA

Jack was sitting at his desk in his assigned quarters six hours after the incredible tour of Poseidon’s Nest. He was short on sleep as he had been for the past six months since the death of his sister, Lynn. Collins had two pictures on his cluttered desk that he kept looking at: one of his sister and mother, posed together in the last photo ever taken of the two women a year before Lynn was murdered; the second of Sarah. She sat on a rock somewhere in the middle of a desert, smiling into the camera, and Jack imagined from time to time it was he who had taken the snapshot and that they might have even been on a vacation together. He closed his eyes momentarily and then went back to his battle plans.

A loud knock sounded on his door and he stood and stretched. He rubbed his sore eyes and then walked to the plastic door and opened it. Before he knew it someone was on him and he stumbled back into the small room, then hit the bed and fell backward. The next thing he realized was that Sarah was kissing him all over his face. He laughed and then while on his back lifted her into the air. He then brought her down and kissed her deeply. After a full minute—a minute that he would never forget as long as he lived—he pushed her off and then while on one elbow looked into her sea-reddened face. Her smile was enormous.

“I see your pleasure cruise has finally docked,” he said with a smile he no longer thought he had been capable of.

“Yeah, it sure had, General,” she said in amazement. “Boy, I can’t wait to spend all of that extra money at the end of the month,” she said with an even larger smile as she leaned over and kissed him again.

Jack finally pulled away again. “Sorry to disappoint you, but the president didn’t see fit to give me the pay-grade advancement with the brevet rank; I guess he spent all of his extra money down here.”

“Damn, Jack, how in the hell are we to live off a colonel’s pay?”

He smiled again and then stood from the small cot, then pulled her to her feet and held her at arm’s length to look her over.

“I see the Russian Navy must have behaved themselves while you were onboard.”

Sarah got a serious look on her face as she reached out and placed her arms around Jack.

“I’ll never tell,” she said with a sadness Jack detected immediately.

“Lost a lot of good men, I hear,” he said as he hugged her back.

Sarah didn’t answer as she buried her face in Jack’s chest, and that to him was good enough.

“Where’s Carl and Jason?” he asked.

Sarah finally pulled back and her smile returned. “They were absconded by a funny little man with a lab coat, Sir … or Lord something or other. They’re taking some sort of magical mystery tour. I was supposed to go but I escaped to see some jerk with two new stars on his collar.”

“Well, they’re in for one hell of an eye opener. You should have gone.”

“I wanted to see only one thing,” she said as she smiled wider.

“And that is?”

“Will.” She laughed before she could get it fully out.

“Ass,” he said.

“One more surprise, Jack, you’ll love this one.”

“What?” he said expecting a gift as she turned away and then looked at him with wide eyes.

“Master Chief Jenks is here.”

Collins turned a nice shade of white as the image of the short, meanest son of a bitch he had ever had the displeasure of meeting came into his mind. He felt like he needed to sit down as he remembered crashing the master chief’s boat, USS
Teacher,
inside the El Dorado mine.

“You look a little put out, General; don’t tell me that man makes you slightly uncomfortable?”

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “The first time he calls me Captain Crunch, or even General Crackhead, I’ll have that seagoing bastard shot!”

“Aw, he likes you too.”

*   *   *

After the brief about HMS
Garrison Lee
, which had left Admiral Everett, Jason Ryan, Anya Korvesky, and Captain Lienanov stunned, Everett turned to Jenks, who sat smiling inside the tram with his booted feet up on the console.

“Compartmentalized, my ass. You knew about this all along.” Everett zipped his cold-weather parka back up and then climbed inside and sat hard onto the plastic seat.

Lienanov, Ryan, and a silent Anya followed suit and the tram started moving again in the opposite direction. Jenks ignored Everett for the moment and turned in his seat to look at the white-faced Russian.

“You wanna tell me again about how
big
that Russian pig boat was you served on, my Red friend?”

The Russian captain squinted his eyes at the gruff master chief and then shook his head in wonder at the size of the grounded battleship he had just seen up close.

“Always buy American, my friend, more bang for the buck.” Jenks puffed on the cigar as he laughed at his own joke. “Now, to your question, Toad. Yes, I knew about the
Lee,
had to because I designed her escape pods
and
the assault craft that will ride inside her superstructure until we’re ready for you hero boys to do your thing. I had to know what in the hell ship I was attaching my work to. And I can tell you one thing, I had those two admirals, Kinkaid and that limey Huffington, so angry they shit gold bricks. But I withheld my designs until they showed me what I needed to see.” Jenks got a bad taste in his mouth and tossed his cigar onto the long dead ice of the inland sea. “Now that I know the whole truth, I wish I would have built a better beer can.”

Everett studied his old friend and then looked back at Anya, who also realized that Master Chief Jenks knew what was at stake.

Jenks faced his old friend and looked at him closely.

“Just make sure you’re not on that battlewagon when she shoves off, Toad, because she’s never coming home again.” He plopped a fresh cigar in his mouth with a far different demeanor as he looked back at the Russian naval officer. “You either, my Red friend. I think losing one ship at a time is quite enough.”

Lienanov listened to Jenks’s words and thought about them.

“As an officer, I will go where I’m needed. And I am not a Red, as you say. I am Second Captain Lienanov of the Northern Fleet.”

“Well, Second Captain Lenny Popoff, I admire your spunk. But just to let you know, the
Garrison Lee
is a death ship in waiting, and she will be crewed by men also not meant to return. So put that in your babushka and smoke it, and then find another way to glorify Mother Russia.”

Everett looked at Jenks, really not liking him that much at the moment, but then he saw that the former navy man was sad enough that he couldn’t look back at his old trainee and friend. Carl knew then that the master chief was on the crew list for the HMS
Garrison Lee
.

16

EVENT GROUP COMPLEX

NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, NEVADA

Matchstick was again at Gus Tilly’s bedside as the old prospector slept a rough sleep. Every so often Mahjtic would reach up and take Gus’s hand when the old prospector started to awaken. Once the long, green fingers wrapped around the man’s hand, he would go silent and let out a long breath and then he would breathe normally. Matchstick really couldn’t fathom his friend growing old, he had been so vital in his introduction to Earth and her ways. The man had not rested since he had arrived so many years before.

Matchstick would watch Gus’s closed eyes with own obsidian, oval-shaped ones, and then he would see the eyes under his lids start to move rapidly as Gus started to dream. Mahjtic didn’t know what he was dreaming about, but he sensed whatever it was made the old man happy, and that was good enough for him. He released the wrinkled, liver-spotted hand and then started to read the briefing from NASA on the destroyed space station.

Matchstick reached over and popped another pizza roll into his small mouth and crunched down upon it. He found eating allowed him to concentrate far better as a writer would consider smoking in the same regard. As he chewed the frozen snack he tapped the photo of the debris field as captured by earth-bound telescope with the tip of his long finger. While he did this and chewed the ice-covered pizza roll, he hummed the old song that Charlie had introduced him to that he was now hooked on and hummed constantly without knowing it: “The Purple People Eater” by Sheb Wooley. The fifties’ novelty hit was a favorite of Charlie Ellenshaw when he smoked that strange tobacco Matchstick always wrinkled his small nose over.

Suddenly Matchstick tapped the debris field as he noticed the full moon in the background of the starfield. It was the moon that had caught his attention and the small alien sat up in his chair. He looked closer and then it dawned on him why the Grays had gone out of their way to destroy the International Space Station when they had left all of the other earth-orbiting objects like satellites alone. The space station provided real-time visuals of the moon and it would have an unobstructed view of it from their position. That was why it was destroyed.

Matchstick spit out the frozen dough and cheese and made a beeline for the door.

The target area for the IP point of the Gray invasion had been discovered, and now Matchstick knew where the Power Vessel and the saucer armada would gather for the attack on Earth: the far side of the moon.

*   *   *

It had taken Europa only minutes to break into as many as two thousand telescopic devices the world over. Pete had been confronted by a very excited and incomprehensible Matchstick in his office just as he received the warning from Virginia in regard to getting Matchstick and Gus back to Chato’s Crawl. But all that was forgotten for the moment as Pete was now in the computer center scanning the area around the moon, selecting the satellites and telescopes that would give him the best view of any dimensional wormhole that would form in space to announce the arrival of the vanguard of Grays and their irreplaceable power-producing saucer. He realized that the Grays weren’t that stupid—why risk entering the atmosphere of Earth and open themselves up to attack, when all they had to do was come in covertly and strike at will from anywhere and never announce their presence with the forming vortex of the wormhole?

Alice Hamilton, who was staying on at Group, came in and traversed the steps to the center’s main floor. She raised her glasses and studied the still shots of the moon provided by Europa and her stolen signals.

“Do you think Matchstick has something?” she asked, looking over at the alien as he popped another frozen pizza roll into his mouth.

Pete looked at their small friend. “Yeah, I think he’s hit on something. His evidence is flimsy, but the attack on the space platform didn’t make any sense at the time. Now it does.”

Alice smiled at the chewing Matchstick and winked as she lowered the glasses on their chain.

“Looks like you may have a starting point for Operation Overlord,” she said to Mahjtic. He smiled and nodded his bulbous head. Alice patted Pete on the back. “Let’s get this out to Camp Alamo, tell them they will have a target very soon.”

“I just checked the status. Since you briefed me, Charlie and I kept an eye on the landline communications down there. It’s a damn good thing I never ordered Europa to dump her memory discs of the analog phone system. As I understand it now, they’ve had some kind of accident down there.”

“What accident?” she asked.

“After Matchstick verified that the power plant would work, some tech down there hooked something up wrong and they nearly lost the entire ship when a coolant line ruptured.”

“God, what next?” she asked herself.

“What’s next is that Virginia says that Matchstick and Gus are in danger because the president and the new head of the CIA want our little friend here in the worst way and will breach our security if they have to. We have orders to get the little guy back home, where we believe he’ll be safe, because no one knows about Chato’s Crawl.”

Matchstick continued to eat and then began humming “Purple People Eater.”